The Elizabethan Shakespere; A New Ed. of Shakespere's Works with Critical Text in Elizabethan English and Brief Notes Illustrative of Elizabethan Life, Thought and Idiom Volume 1

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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1903 edition. Excerpt: ...of Scotland" Slatyer's Palaealbion, 1619, g. 282. Holinshed also makes leance escape, not at the time of the murder, but later. T20 WE HAVE LOST was probably intended for a contraction, 'we've lost.' T21 BEST HALFE: the partitive superlative frequently appears in EL.E. without the definite article, as here, cp. "I am grieved to see how we employ most part of our time " ACT III SCENE III FIRST MURTHERER Let it come downe. THEY SET UPON BANQUO BANQUO O, trecherie! Flye, good Fleans, flye, flye, flye, Thou may'st revenge. O slave! DIES. FLEANS ESCAPES THIRD MURTHERER Who did strike out the light? FIRST MURTHERER Was 't not the way? THIRD MURTHERER There 's but one downe; the sonne is fled. SECOND MURTHERER We have lost Best halfe of our affaire. FIRST MURTHERER Well, let 's away and say how much is done. Florio's Montaigne, 1. xxv. EXEU NT INTRODUCTORY NOTE TO SCENE IV The scene that follows is really the critical point of the play. Macbeth's insanity now becomes a menace to his personal security, and the other 'tortures of his mind' pale before a greater torture when he becomes aware that the "fits" which he suffers from have become matters of public comment, and that now he cannot help betraying himself and unfolding all the dark horrors of his life to the public gaze. His terrible dreams have now invaded the daylight. His will, whose impotence to restrain his own evil ambitions he becomes aware of in the first act of the play, is now the active agent of powers which, fight against it as he may, are assuring his own destruction. How frequent the fits must be Shakspere contrives to show us in presenting but one: what anxieties they cause the...show more